Make xenharmonic music and explore musical tunings.

Overview

microwave is a microtonal waveform synthesizer based on:

• tune – a microtonal library
• Nannou – a UI framework
• FluidLite – a soundfont renderer

It features a virtual piano UI enabling you to play polyphonic microtonal melodies with your touch screen or mouse. The UI provides information about pitches and just intervals in custom tuning systems.

Installation

bash cargo install -f microwave

You might need to install additional dependencies required by Nannou. For me, the following setup worked:

bash sudo apt install pkg-config libx11-dev

If this doesn't help or you don't use apt, try following these instructions.

Usage

You can run microwave in continuous or scale-based mode:

bash microwave # Continuous microwave equal 1:22:2 # 22-EDO scale

For playback of sampled sounds provide the location of a soundfont file:

bash microwave -s /usr/share/sounds/sf2/FluidR3_GM.sf2 equal 1:22:2

The command should spawn a a window showing a virtual keyboard.

Use your touch screen or mouse to play melodies on the virtual piano. At present, polyphonic melodies can only be played via the touch screen.

To see how scale expressions work, visit tune.